Mary Wollaston by Henry Kitchell Webster (best story books to read txt) 📕

momentary pleasure in having evaded introducing him as Madame Carresford's husband, she turned away and went back to the car.

For the moment the spectacle of her father in the role of a young lover touched her no more acutely than with a mild half-humorous melancholy. She even paid the tribute of a passing smile to the queer reversal of their roles, her own and his. She was more like a mother brooding over the first love-affair of an adolescent son. It was so young of him, younger, she believed, than any act she herself could be capable of, to have come to Paula's performance without letting her know and waited shyly alone in the dark while the herd of her acquaintances crowded in and monopolized her. Pathetically young, almost intolerably pathetic in a man in his middle fifties. She wondered if he had come up for _Tosca_ the night before and gone away without a word.

She had spoken quite without authority in assuring him of Paula's welcome. Paula had not, she thought, spoken of him once either in connection with her disappointment the night before or with her triumph to-night. Yet that he would get a lover's welcome she had very little doubt. It was his moment certainly. Paula left alone up there at last, sated with an overwhelming success, tired, relaxed...

With an effort of will Mary settled herself a little more deeply in the seat behind the wheel and lighted a cigarette. She hated having to wait, having to be found waiting when they came down together. She wished she could just--disappear. It wasn't possible, of course.

It was not very long before they came down. "She says I may stay two days," John told Mary as they squeezed into their seats in the little roadster. "Then, relentlessly, she's going to turn me out." But his voice was beyond disguise that of a lover who has prospered.

Mary drove them in almost unbroken silence all the way, down the ravine road and up through the woods to the house in the village. Then she went on with the car to their garage which stood in a yard of a neighbor, two or three doors away. She rejected with curt good-humor her father's offer to help her with this job. It was what she always did by herself, she said, and took a momentary perverse pleasure, which she despised herself for, in the obvious fact that this troubled him.

Back in the cottage living-room, ten minutes later perhaps, she found him alone and heard then, the explanation of his having come. They had got the Sunday papers out at Hickory Hill as usual in the middle of the morning but had found no reference to the performance of _Tosca_ the night before. John had spent a good part of the day fretting over the absence of any news as to how Paula's venture had succeeded and puzzling over the lack of it in the papers. Then the obvious explanation had struck one of the boys, that the papers that came out to Hickory Hill on Sunday were an early edition.

He had had old Pete drive him straight into town, at that, and there he had found the news-stand edition containing the criticisms. The unfairness of them had disturbed him greatly. Orders or no orders, he hadn't been able to endure the thought of leaving Paula to suffer under the sting of a sneer like that without making at least an effort to comfort her. He had driven out to Ravinia without any idea that she was to sing again that night; had been told of it at the park where he had stopped for the purpose of picking up some one who could conduct him to her house. Learning that she was about to sing again, he had exerted all his will power and waited until this second ordeal should be over.

"It was as much one for me as it could have been for her," he concluded. "I don't know what stage fright is, but vicarious stage fright is the devil. I never was so terrified in my life. I hope nobody I knew saw me. I took pains they shouldn't, for I must have looked like a ghost."

"There's nothing the matter with your looks now," she told him. "Hickory Hill must be just the place for you."

"It would be," he assented, "if it were possible for me to be whole-heartedly there. By the way, we've got a visitor. Anthony March."

She felt herself flush at that with clear pleased surprise. "Oh, that's as nice as possible," she said. "But how in the world did it happen? How did you find him? Paula was trying to and couldn't."

"Was she?" Her father's voice, she thought, flattened a little on the question. "Why, he found us. He turned up on foot--Friday morning, it must have been--with a knapsack on his shoulders; came to the farm-house door and asked if he should tune the piano. Luckily, I happened to be about and caught him before he could get away. He was combining a walking trip, he said, with his own way of earning a living and I persuaded him to stay for a few days and make us a visit."

The last part of that sentence, Paula, coming down into the room from up-stairs, heard.

"Who?" she asked. "Who's the visitor you've been persuading?"

It was just a good-natured way of showing her interest in anything that her husband might happen to be talking about. But when he answered, "Anthony March," she came into focus directly.

"Thank goodness, you've found him!" she said. "I had about given him up.--And I really need him."

"I thought," said John, "that you had given him up. Are you going to do his opera, after all?"

"Opera!" said Paula blankly, as if she had never heard of such a thing. "No, I want him to see if he can fix this beastly piano they've given me so that it's fit to work with."

And John, after a moment-laughed.

It was a shattering sort of laugh to Mary. She stared at the man who uttered it as if he were--what he had for the moment become--a stranger. He was not, certainly, the man who, down in North Carolina had talked about March with her, regretted the "rough justice" he had had from Paula and considered the possibility of repairing it. That momentary blank look of his had shown that he perceived the insensitive egotism of his wife's attitude. Not even now that her success was an established thing had she a regretful thought for the man who had hoped to share it with her. She had forgotten those hopes. All she remembered now about Anthony March was that he could tune pianos better than any one else.

This Mary's father saw and yet he laughed. A cruel laugh. He had felt for the moment a recurrence of the old jealousy. In his relief from it, he, a reassured lover, triumphed in the humiliation of one he had supposed his rival.

Mary managed to hide her face from him--superfluously because he wasn't looking at her--and thought up, desperately, a few more questions about how they were getting on at Hickory Hill.

But she went on feeling from moment to moment more horribly in the way, and at last with a simulated yawn she said she was going to bed. "This--vicarious success is rather tiring," she told her father; "almost as bad as vicarious stage fright." And then to Paula, "Is there any reason, if you're going to keep father here for two days, why I shouldn't steal a holiday?"

"Go away, do you mean?" Paula asked with a faint flush. "Why,--where would you go?"

"I could drive over to Hickory Hill," Mary said, "either by myself in the little car or with Pete in the big one. Whichever you wouldn't rather have here."

"I think that's a capital idea," John said. "Oh, you'd better take the big car with Pete. It would be rather a long drive for you all by yourself in the little one."

This was not the real reason, of course. He wouldn't want a chauffeur under foot while he was honeymooning about with Paula.

Owing to a late start and an errand which at the last moment Paula wanted done in Chicago, it was getting on toward four o'clock when Pete drove Mary up to the loading platform of the old apple house at Hickory Hill. The farm Ford was standing there idling in a syncopated manner and apparently on the point of departure somewhere. Where, was explained a moment later by the emergence of Sylvia Stannard in her conventional farm costume of shirt and breeches with a two-gallon jug in each hand.

"Oh," she said, "then the big car can take Miss Wollaston over to Durham, can't it?--so she won't have to ride in the Ford which she hates. How do you do? I'm awfully glad you've come. We weren't expecting you, were we? Was anybody, I mean?"

Mary allowed herself a laugh at this young thing with her refreshing way of saying first whatever first came into her head and letting this serve as a greeting, said she was sure the big car and Pete were equal to taking her aunt to the four-miles-distant village.

"That's all right then. I won't have to wait for her," said Sylvia, letting down her jugs into the tonneau of the Ford. "I'll run straight along with this. They must be simply perishing for it. Isn't it hot, though!"

Mary wanted to know who they were and what they were perishing for. "Lemonade," said Sylvia, "for the boys out in the hay field. It's perfectly gorgeous out there but hot enough to frizz your hair."

"Where is the hay field?" Mary asked. "Is it very far?"

"It's just over in the northeast eighty," said Sylvia, with a rather conscious parade of her mastery of bucolic vernacular. "But you don't want to walk. It would be awfully jolly if you would come along with me."

"Wait two minutes until I've said hello to Aunt Lucile and I will," said Mary, and turned to go into the house.

"Don't step on any of the piano," Sylvia called after her. "It's spread all over the place."

They had made a good many changes in the apple house since Mary had gone to Ravinia, but the thing that drew a little cry of surprise from her was this old square piano. The case of it stood snugly in the corner of the west wall. But the works were spread about the room in a manner which made Sylvia's warning less far-fetched than it seemed.

The feeling that caught Mary at sight of it was more than just surprise. Its dismantled condition brought to her a half-scared but wholly happy reassurance that Anthony March was really here.

Her journey to Hickory Hill had been, so she had told herself at intervals during the day, merely a flight from her father and Paula. There was no real reason for thinking that she would find March at the end of it. Week-end visits usually ended Monday morning, and it was probable that he would have gone hours before she arrived. She was conscious now of having commanded herself not to be silly when she was fretting over the late start from Ravinia and Paula's errand in town. It _would_ be nice to see him again! He was probably out in the hay field with the others.

She gave her aunt a rather absent-minded greeting and a highly condensed summary of her news. Her father was